


But Never Broken

by Sholio



Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Developing Friendships, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, sick/hurt at formal social event
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:08:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24242587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Ward managed to talk Danny into coming to the Rand annual anniversary gala, but even from beyond the grave, Harold is still finding ways to screw their lives up. Set between seasons.
Relationships: Ward Meachum & Danny Rand
Comments: 10
Kudos: 75
Collections: Hurt Comfort Exchange 2020





	But Never Broken

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scioscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/gifts).



Ward found the trap while unwrapping the Rand Industries 30th-anniversary plaque, which he had almost forgotten about until the company's anniversary gala. Or more accurately, the trap found him.

The plaque was one of the few items from Harold's penthouse that he'd bothered to keep. After ... everything, he had considered just selling the damn place, furniture and all, to anyone who'd take it, but backed out at the last minute because there was no telling what was actually _in_ it -- the potential blackmail material alone, for him personally and for the family, staggered the mind. For the same reason, he didn't dare trust it to a cleaning company. He couldn't even begin to guess what sort of videos and other items might turn up on New York's black market afterwards.

So he cleaned it himself, over the months after Dad died (for real this time), and Joy left, and Danny left. It wasn't like he had anything else to do; his life at this point was entirely composed of work, and NA meetings, and a desperate struggle not to drown in pills and booze and his own dark thoughts.

Cleaning out the penthouse didn't exactly _help_ with that, but it was cathartic, in its own way. One night he went a little bit crazy and attacked the paintings and statues and Harold's desk and even the walls, using every item in Harold's weirdly comprehensive collection of ornamental edged weaponry. Danny would probably have blathered on about ritual purification, but for Ward there was something ritually purifying about hacking the shit out of Dad's office equipment with a 17th-century German broadsword.

After that it was easier; he felt less panicked when he was there, less like Dad's undead ghost was lurking around every corner, waiting to snake an arm around his throat and draw him back down into the suffocating muck of the last twelve years of his life. It still wasn't _fun,_ but ripping down the paintings and hacking up the walls made it feel more open, somehow. He threw everything into trash bins, shredded it, destroyed it. When he'd stripped the whole place down to the (somewhat hacked-at) walls, he unloaded it on a real estate office and told them to set the price as they liked and tell him when they'd sold it.

Out of everything in the penthouse, he only kept a handful of things. And one of them was the commemorative plaque, which he found all wrapped up in a drawer of Dad's desk. He unwrapped a corner just enough to make sure that it was what he thought it was.

Dad had been talking about the 30th-anniversary event since basically the end of the previous year's festive ordeal. He'd already started with the planning, having Ward order things and un-order things, giving him detailed litanies of instructions that changed the next day, and punishing him for failing to, in essence, be a mind reader. One day it'd be punishment for lack of initiative if Ward asked what items he needed to substitute, and the next day, punishment for substituting without asking. Basically, the usual.

Dad had died, of course, long before the big event. But some of what he'd ordered, or had Ward order, had already arrived, and one of the pieces was this commemorative ... thing. It was a laser-cut glass plaque, with the Rand logo inside and the dates. It was supposed to be unveiled at the gala and then go in the lobby.

If the plaque had contained likenesses of Harold and Wendell, like some of the other commemorative junk that Ward had already thrown away, he would just have trashed it. But this was actually pretty classy, and it _would_ look good in the lobby, and it _did_ make sense to do something a little special for the gala. Not for Dad. But for the sake of the company, and, well ... because he thought Danny might like it.

Danny had been back in New York for months now, and things were kind of ... good. Danny still wanted to keep the company at arm's length, to Ward's irritation; on some level, he had been expecting Danny to show up back in town and step right into running the place. A Rand and a Meachum, like back in their fathers' day. But Danny, showing a flash of that implacable stubbornness that was his trademark, seemed to be determined to have nothing to do with it. He was living down in Chinatown and working at a goddamn moving company. He and Ward had lunch occasionally, and Ward thought they'd both probably been about equally surprised to find out that, away from the toxic disaster that Harold had turned their families and the company into, they actually liked each other's company.

Ward was still waiting for the other shoe to drop with Danny, for Ward to do or say something that would break things again, because that was how it seemed to go with them. But Danny had even said he'd come to the gala, which, well ... Ward was expecting him not to show up (Danny was kind of unreliable like that), but just the fact that he'd said he'd come was kind of nice.

It was the one good thing about it. This was Ward's first year having to pull off the big Rand anniversary gala by himself, without Harold quietly puppeteering him from behind the scenes.

And of course it _would_ be the big 30th-anniversary event. Technically the company went back farther than that, in some incarnation, but that was the day Dad and Wendell had gone public and their star had begun to rise. Every year they'd held a party on that date, starting out as a small event for upper-level employees and investors, and blossoming over the first few years into a grand gala in the event space on the Rand building's 10th floor. 

Ward had grown up with it, at first running around under the tables and trying to keep track of the little kids, and later planning and executing it on his own ... well, somewhat on his own. In actual fact, while he was technically in charge, very little of it had ever been down to him. Joy had usually had a major hand in the fundraiser side, and Harold had micromanaged it down to the color of the table decorations. Ward had dreaded the fundraiser for weeks beforehand, among other reasons because it involved working even more closely with Harold than usual, and Harold invariably had very specific ideas about how it should all go down, not all of which he bothered to communicate to Ward.

This year he dreaded it for a whole different reason: because he'd never done it on his own before. Therefore he ended up pawning the entire planning process off on Meghan, who probably didn't deserve that, but she was leaving anyway; she'd given him a month's notice, so she got to spend her last month on the job hip-deep in corporate sponsor lists and catering options. She kept asking him questions, to which he replied in each case some variation on "Do what you want," and eventually she stopped asking.

He was going to be _so goddamn glad_ when the damn thing was over. He spent the entire morning of the event wound in knots, unable to bring himself to eat anything because, from the feel of things, it would've come right back up. It wasn't that he cared how the event went. He never had cared; it was all Dad's thing, and Joy's. He wished he could avoid it completely, but, unlike Danny, _some people_ had responsibilities and couldn't go gallivanting off to play at being furniture movers whenever they felt like it.

(Seriously, a moving company, Danny, _why.)_

But for the last twelve years, every last one of these events had been an absolute minefield. There had been a couple of years when Harold had prompted him all night long through an earpiece; _that_ had been fun. There was the year when he screwed up the catering and Harold beat the shit out of him two hours before he was supposed to walk into the ballroom and he'd spent the entire night feeling blood trickle down his back underneath the tux. And of course, there were the later years, when he'd ended up drinking throughout the evening to ease the stress, or showing up already halfway drunk. Last year he'd downed something like a bottle and a half of champagne in the first two hours of the event because he was so stressed about it and Joy found him getting sick in the coat room.

Basically it was not his favorite time of year.

But it was stupid, he told himself, to be so wound up like this over something like this. Harold was _gone._ Dead. Dead-for-real. It was _Ward's_ event now, and all he had to do was shake some hands and show off the damn plaque to the paparazzi and investors, and then he could duck out early. 

He would have dearly _loved_ to take the razor edge off his nerves somehow, but one thing they kept harping on at NA was that, especially in the early days, any mood-altering substance at all could lead to falling off the wagon, and as much as he would have loved a quick drink or a Xanax, Ward wasn't quite desperate enough to risk it.

Still, he couldn't quite get past the superstitious fear that Dad was going to fuck this up for him, somehow. Life with Dad had meant constantly having to stay on his toes, alert to the changes in Dad's emotional weather, and Ward didn't know how to turn that _off._ He was doing okay, most of the time, or at least he was _acting_ okay, which was basically the same thing. But there were some things, like this gala, that made the past come lurching out of the black pit in his mind, like Dad's reanimated corpse crawling out of a swamp and back into his life. And it just kept happening, it wouldn't stop happening; he'd killed Dad -- _twice_ \-- and he was never going to get free of him.

But there a rented tux to put on, and an event to go to, and he smoothed himself down, all the holes on the surface spackled over -- like they weren't still there underneath -- and he went downstairs and shook hands with Rand's investors and smiled stiffly at the cameras and _made it work._

*

He was completely unprepared for the little lift in his chest when he saw Danny walk in. Ward hadn't actually thought he'd come. Just the sight of Danny caused a slight unknotting of the tangle of steel wire in his chest for the first time all day. It was a feeling like maybe he wasn't doing this entirely alone after all.

Even more surprising, Danny had Colleen with him, looking cool and tidy in a swishy green dress. Danny was wearing a tuxedo and had actually mashed down his wild curls somewhat, although Ward scanned down to his feet and ... yep ... sneakers. Ward closed his eyes for a moment. Well, the photos of the gala probably wouldn't show his feet.

But Danny lit up too, when he saw Ward, and Ward went over to greet them. "So you decided to darken the door of Rand after all," he said.

And then he wished he'd said something more welcoming rather than falling back on sarcasm, but Danny, being Danny, just laughed. There was an awkward moment when Ward started to go for a handshake and Danny went for a hug and Danny won; Ward got grappled into a hug and then clung to for a minute. Danny, as Ward had unfortunately learned in the past, was a very enthusiastic hugger. Ward heard cameras going off nearby, and just hoped Danny wasn't messing up his hair.

When Danny let go, Ward turned to shake Colleen's hand. He had never seen her in a dress before and in fact if he'd tried to imagine it, he wasn't sure he would have been able to. She looked as uncomfortable here as Ward felt, and had a terrifyingly strong handshake.

"Colleen," he said. "Uh. Thanks for coming."

"This place looks amazing," Danny said, craning his neck to look around. "This is super nice. I forgot our building even had this floor."

Ward was still grateful enough that Danny had actually showed up to squash his urge to say something like _Maybe you'd remember if you were ever here._ Instead, he pointed out, "You used to go to these too, when we were kids."

"Oh yeah." Danny got a happy, reminiscing look. "Joy and I would play hide-and-seek under the tables."

"I _know._ I kept having to drag you out of there and try to keep you from getting stains all over your clothes."

"Remember when Joy and I decided we wanted to know what champagne tasted like?"

"Oh God," Ward said, because he _had_ forgotten, and now it all came rushing back, the combination of horror and hilarity of finding a pair of partially inebriated, very guilty-looking six-year-olds behind the water fountain in the hallway. They had been extremely cuddly and just wanted to drape themselves on him and tell him they loved him and beg him not to tell their parents.

He hadn't, but their parents found out anyway, and Ward had gotten a memorable lashing with Dad's belt. He was pretty sure Danny didn't know that, based on Danny's look of misty nostalgia.

"We were sick for _days,"_ Danny said cheerfully.

"You deserved it," Ward said. "Little hoodlums."

"How long ago was that, anyway?" 

Which was the point when Ward remembered he'd forgotten the damn plaque, the centerpiece of the evening. It was still upstairs in his office.

"Uh, yeah, a while, I guess. Look, I gotta get something. I'll be right back. Go ... mingle, or something."

He took the elevator upstairs. Most of the building was dead quiet as usual for after hours, but the lights were still on, giving it an eerie, haunted feeling. The plaque, still in its cardboard wrapper, was on Ward's desk where he'd left it. The edge of the cardboard was torn open from when he'd checked it in Harold's penthouse months ago, but it occurred to him that he'd better unwrap it up here and make sure it wasn't ... God knows, something entirely different, something Dad ordered just to fuck with him, _who the hell knows._ Ward had approved the final design for the plaque and ordered it, but he wouldn't put it past Dad not to have slipped some sweetly poisonous bit of backhanded "appreciation" for Danny's family into it, and Ward wanted this evening to be nice, not the accidental start of Round Two between himself and Danny.

He sat on the edge of the desk and ripped off the cardboard, revealing the glossy crystalline plaque with the embedded logo and the company's date of founding. It really _was_ very nice-looking, very classy. He peeled the last of the packing materials away, and something stung him, sharp, like a bee sting.

Ward pulled his hand back, staring at it blankly. There was a tiny needle embedded in his finger. He recognized it right away, or at least the type of thing it was. The general category of thing.

He had completely forgotten -- actually _forgotten_ \-- that Dad used to do things like this. What had Dad said about this plaque, exactly?

_I need you to handle this personally, Ward. There's no one else I can trust with it. Won't you do that for me, son?_

Yeah, having some intern accidentally stab themselves on a poison needle wouldn't be half as much fun, Ward thought. 

He started to pull out the needle with his fingertips, then used a handkerchief to be on the safe side. It came out easily, leaving a bead of bright red blood behind. Ward blotted it with the handkerchief.

He couldn't _believe_ he hadn't checked for any of Dad's little surprises. It was like he'd forgotten everything he'd learned over the last decade. He found himself laughing softly and a little bit hysterically. It was that or scream.

His hand tingled oddly. He shook it and flexed the fingers. There was a worrying metallic taste on the back of his tongue, but it went away a minute later.

He was pretty sure Dad wouldn't have outright tried to kill him; where's the fun in that? These little traps were meant to "keep him on his toes," as Dad put it. Which didn't mean they couldn't be unpleasant as hell in the meantime.

He wrapped up the needle in his handkerchief and tucked it into his breast pocket. He could run it over to the lab for analysis as soon as he got the plaque presentation part of the evening done with. And then he checked the plaque all over very carefully for anything else amiss, but it seemed to be fine. God, the last thing he'd want would be to accidentally poison Danny with one of these fucking things. The needle had been wedged into the packing foam, right where it was most convenient to grab it and pull it off.

 _I can't believe Dad actually got me with one of those damn things._ That hadn't happened in years.

His heart was racing, but that could easily just be adrenaline. He picked up the plaque and headed for the elevator. As he stepped inside, a wave of dizziness washed over him. He leaned a hand against the wall. It was gone a moment later.

Maybe a trip to the lab wouldn't be a bad idea ...

But there was no one _there_ , not with the gala going on, and after hours too. He'd have to hunt up someone, and worse, he would have to explain why he needed a rush analysis.

_My dad, you know, the founder of the company, the one whose picture is all over the place in here? He likes to poison me for fun. And yes, I know he's been dead for months._

Yeah, that sounded plausible.

The elevator door opened on the ballroom level. Ward wiped his sweaty palms on his tuxedo pants and brushed past the coat check. His heart was still racing, his chest tight, but at this point it was utterly impossible to tell the difference between actual symptoms and his own panic. It would be just like Dad, too, to let him panic over what was actually nothing more dire than a pushpin with a broken-off head.

You just didn't _know._ You never knew. That was the way Dad's games worked.

He spotted Danny and Colleen across the room, hanging out by the buffet table. Ward took a breath and straightened his shoulders, tugged down the hem of his jacket. He could play normal for the next few minutes, get the plaque-related gladhanding over with, and then crash in a corner of his office 'til this wore off.

 _So, Bethany, does this count as a mood-altering substance or not?_ he wondered, as a rush of cold chills prickled down his spine and then drained away.

He was still hoping it wouldn't be bad. That everything he'd felt so far was just nerves, his earlier nervous tension with the dial cranked way up. It was a mind game, like everything else.

Danny waved to him as he approached the buffet. "Did you try these shrimp things, Ward? They're great. Ooh, is that the thing?" Putting his paper plate aside, he reached for the plaque tucked under Ward's arm.

Ward jerked it away on pure instinct, half-turning his body to keep Danny away from the damn thing. Sure, he'd checked it for booby traps, but who the fuck knew what Dad had put on there? Danny looked startled, then slightly hurt.

"Your fingers are literally covered in grease," Ward said shortly. "You'll see it just fine when we do the photo op."

"Oh. Right. Sorry." Danny's sunny nature bounced back immediately, while Colleen stuffed an entire canape in her mouth as if to stop herself from saying anything. Danny grabbed a handful of napkins and diligently scrubbed his fingers. "Can I see it, though? Just hold it up for me."

Ward sighed and held it up, handling it carefully by the edges, but nearly dropped it when the fingers of his right hand -- the pinpricked one -- refused to take the weight as he'd expected. He tilted it hastily to rest most of its weight in the palm of his other hand.

"That's so cool! It really does look great. Look, Colleen, it's got the logo and the dates and our parents' names, all four of them."

Colleen nodded, her cheeks bulging like a squirrel's, and reached for the crab dip. It was clear that her strategy for getting through the evening was based around eating everything in sight.

"I wouldn't think having Dad's name on here would be a big selling point for you." Ward tucked the plaque under his arm again. Another wave of shivering washed through him; he managed to steady himself with a hip against the buffet table, and clenched his teeth to keep them from chattering.

"Yes, but your dad is part of this company's history, Ward," Danny said with that earnestness that Ward appreciated and loathed in equal measure. "I'm not going to sweep that under the rug or pretend our dads never were friends."

"Our dads never _were_ friends," Ward said, spitting out the words in a surge of vehemence that caught him by surprise; his current feelings on Harold were not at their most charitable.

Danny looked taken aback. "I don't think that's completely true."

God, Danny was still, after all of it, clinging to a rose-colored-glasses vision of their shared childhood. Ward blinked cold sweat out of his eyes and leaned forward, gritting out between teeth that kept trying to chatter, "Friends don't murder their friends, Danny."

Danny opened his mouth and closed it, looking awkward, while intense discomfort radiated from Colleen's direction. As Ward replayed what he'd just said, the shivering chill that ran through him this time had nothing to do with poison.

Because _he'd_ done that, hadn't he? He'd tried to murder Danny. More than once. They got around it, mostly, by just not talking about it, that gaping hole in their slowly mending relationship that Ward had put there. But it was still there, hidden beneath a paper-thin covering they both pretended was sold ground -- and this feeling, he thought, was his foot punching right through into the empty air underneath. 

Well, he'd wondered when he was going to break this thing they were rebuilding. It wasn't a matter of if, it was a matter of when, and it was, in a way, a relief to have the suspense over.

"Ward --" Danny began.

"I'm ... it's ... I'll be -- over there," Ward said, and strode past him, past _them_ \-- he wasn't oblivious to the way that Colleen had moved in until her shoulder was almost touching Danny's, a silent gesture of support.

"Ward!" Danny sounded exasperated.

Ward kept walking until he'd covered half the ballroom, bumping into a few people, and managed to put an enormous flower arrangement between himself and Danny. His chest felt tight, like a hand was closing on it, squeezing the air out of him. Leaning against the table holding the plants, he tried to catch his breath.

"Mr. Meachum?" Meghan descended on him, clipboard in hand. "There you are! We're setting up for the photo op with the plaque; do you have -- oh. There!"

She tried to take it. Ward tried to hold on and then realized he was being ridiculous and relinquished it into her hands. There was nothing else wrong with it; he'd checked thoroughly. It wasn't going to hurt anyone but him. His dad's traps usually didn't, not that Harold cared about collateral damage, exactly, but his games usually were meant for Ward and Ward alone.

"Oh, this is nice," Meghan said, holding it up so the laser-cut logo caught and splintered the light. She frowned past it at him. "Are you all right, sir?"

"Fine," Ward said, straightening his back. 

"It's just, you look pale, and ..." She pressed her lips together, biting the words back, and it hit Ward that she thought he'd taken something, some kind of drugs or alcohol. She'd been working for him for two years; she knew what he was like.

"I'll be good for the photo op," he said tightly, and then caught a glimpse of Danny hovering around not too far away, having apparently followed him across the room. "There's Danny. Go get him set up, would you? I'll be there in a minute."

Meghan nodded and trotted off, the plaque clutched in her hands. She intercepted Danny, who got that familiar look of belligerent frustration, which was the last sight of him that Ward had before retreating behind more flower arrangements leading to the hallway that went down to the restrooms.

He was well aware he was being ridiculous. He couldn't play hide-and-seek with Danny forever, even in a room full of people. It hadn't worked when they were kids, let alone now.

But he didn't want to find out if Danny wanted to catch up to yell at him or ... whatever it was that Danny had in mind. Right now he felt _fragile,_ like a glass bell jar around vacuum -- stable enough for the moment, but capable of exploding into splinters if it was touched wrong.

So he fled into the men's room. He found a wall to lean against and pretended to be fiddling with his tuxedo tie until the one other occupant finished his business and left. Then Ward lurched to the row of marble-topped sinks and stared at himself in the mirror.

He could see why Meghan had thought he was on drugs again. He was chalk-white, with blue shadows under his eyes and a faint bluish tinge to his lips that he hoped was just the lights in here. His chest still ached, and he was dizzy now too.

He looked down at his hand and flexed it. The fingers responded sluggishly. Where he'd stabbed himself on the needle, there was a raised welt, and the end of his finger from the first knuckle on down was dead white.

Stupid Dad and his stupid games.

Ward scooped up a double handful of water and splashed it on his face, then raked a wet hand through his hair, smoothing it down, and dried his face on a hand towel. He looked at himself in the mirror and tried to arrange his face to calm smoothness. He'd had plenty of practice when Dad was alive, after all. Well ... un-alive. Whatever.

He could get through this. Just the photo op, and then he'd vanish for a while. Let Danny deal with the paparazzi for a change, he thought vindictively, turning the sharp edge of scorn outward rather than in.

He stiffened his spine, checked his game face in the mirror one more time, and marched out of the bathroom, only to nearly collide with Danny coming in.

"Ward!" Danny said. "Listen, what we were talking about earlier --"

"We are not discussing this now," Ward said flatly. Now or ever, as far as he was concerned. "Photo op. That way. Meghan was supposed to be getting you ready. Where is she?"

"Yes, but -- _Ward_ \--"

Ward pushed past him, leaving Danny to hurry, trying to catch up and making exasperated noises. Meghan intercepted them both coming out into the ballroom again. "We're almost set up! Are you two ready?"

"Absolutely," Ward said with as much fake cheer as he could muster. The shivers were back, and meanwhile, Danny was glaring at him and seemed to be trying to send him telepathic signals using eye contact, so Ward refused to meet his eyes.

The irrevocable breakup of a friendship was not supposed to involve the other person following you at a distance of about two feet, hissing your name under his breath.

"Ward, I swear to God --"

The photo op backdrop was Meghan's doing as well. She'd made a stunning flower arrangement backdrop with large photos of both founders blown up and framed and arranged among the flowers. Harold and Wendell, shaking hands. Harold with his arm around Wendell. It brought Ward to an abrupt halt. He had a brief, angry thought that Meghan should have asked him, and then remembered that she _had_ actually asked him; she'd asked him a lot of questions about the gala, and he'd just told her to do her own thing. This was probably his karmic comeuppance.

"Whoa," said Danny, behind him, who apparently hadn't seen this part of it yet either.

A wave of dizziness washed over Ward, and he wrenched his gaze away from his dad, beaming from the photos with the mild, fatherly air of someone who _definitely_ was not planning on murdering the business partner standing next to him. Given the ups and downs of his relationship with Danny, it was probably fitting that they were going to get to do this photo op with pictures of Harold and his murder victim placed prominently behind them.

"That looks ... um, really nice, Ward," Danny said, not very sincerely, and Ward couldn't help noticing that Danny had a mildly stricken look on his face, and the way he was trying not to look at any of the photos for too long.

 _Good,_ Ward thought, and the vindictive, clenched knot in his chest tightened a little more. It was good to have things out in the open, right? Harold and his murders; Ward and his attempted murders. Like father, like son.

It was better than dwelling on the hurt that had flashed across Danny's face, just for a minute, seeing those pictures. Blindsided by them, as Ward had been, through his own inaction.

 _See?_ he thought, taking up position on one side of the flower arrangement and trying not to look at Danny. _We hurt people. It's what we do, we Meachums. You KNOW that._

Danny sidled up beside him. "You look kind of pale, you know? Do you want to sit down before the --"

"You're supposed to be over there," Ward interrupted, straight-arming him to the far end of the flower arrangement.

Danny rolled his eyes, but stayed on his side for a change.

Meghan came up with the plaque. "I was thinking individual pictures with each of you holding it, and then both of you holding it in the middle. Does that sound good?"

"That's great, Meghan," Danny said. "You're good at this."

"It's fine," Ward said stiffly. He'd just realized that he had his right side toward Danny, with the bad hand, which was going to make holding the plaque difficult. Also, the dizziness was back, and it was bad. He had his hip against the table, as a stable point in the uncertain, spinning world.

Photo op, and then he was going to go lie down and maybe see if he could figure out what Dad had poisoned him with.

Meghan fussed around them, moving flowers, touching Danny lightly to turn him a little more toward the cameras, touching Ward to turn him a little more toward Danny.

Fucking Dad, Ward thought, yielding to her small redirections. Dad poisoned everything he touched. He'd poisoned the company, letting the Hand in. He'd poisoned Ward, figuratively and literally. He'd poisoned Ward's relationship with Danny, poisoned it from the beginning, and just gone on driving wedges between them, leaving scorched earth nothing could grow in.

All that Ward had learned from his father was how to break things. He didn't know why he'd thought he could fix all of this: the company, himself, even his childhood friendship with Danny, such as it was.

Fuck all this, he thought wearily, as another surge of dizziness washed over him and prickled his back with cold sweat. After this, what he was doing was getting drunk. _Screw_ staying on the wagon. What had it gotten him anyway?

Something touched his shoulder, light and warm, a single point of contact. He looked down, his mind lagging. It was Danny's hand. Danny had edged in again, closing the distance between them, and caught Ward lightly with his fingertips.

"You were tilting," Danny murmured. "Seriously, you _don't_ look good. Did you, um ... take something? Before the party? Because --"

"Mr. Rand, you're supposed to be over here," Meghan said, breaking them up and hustling Danny over to the far side of the flower backdrop. "Here, why don't we do the photos with you and the plaque first? Here, just hold it like this ..."

Ward had to clench his teeth at the sight of Danny holding the thing, restraining an urge to smash it out of his hands. That would go over well, he thought. Photo op: Meachum heir assaulting Rand heir. Well, they'd just be carrying on the grand family tradition in front of the cameras this time.

He blinked, getting his vision back into focus again. Cameras flashed, a quick flurry of light. The ballroom crowd had drifted over to see what was happening, at least those that could be drawn away from the buffet and the open bar. There was a splash of green at the front of the crowd: Colleen, looking not at Danny as Ward would have expected, but right at him, frowning slightly.

"... and you," Meghan said, and the plaque landed back in his hands, solid and heavy. Ward nearly dropped it. His right hand was like a glove, the fingers stiff. If Dad had caused him permanent nerve damage, so help him --

 _New_ new plan: after this, a stiff drink, and then the ER. His heart felt like it was trying to beat its way out of his chest. Maybe by that time he could come up with a better explanation than "my dead dad managed to poison me from beyond the grave."

Meghan corrected his grip with light touches, moved the plaque to one side, then glided out of the way. God, she was wasted on filing paperwork for him. It occurred to him that he'd never actually asked where her new job was. He should give her a card or something. A going-away party. A cake that said THANK YOU FOR PUTTING UP WITH MY DRUNKEN SHIT, LOVE, WARD.

"Group pose!" Meghan declared, and she moved them a bit closer in. Ward wasn't quite sure what to do with the plaque, which at the moment was propped a bit crookedly against his body, with one corner poking him in the ribs. Meghan gripped it by both edges and whisked it out of his hands, held it up at about shoulder height between them. Danny took hold of its edge and grinned over at Ward, a warm grin of camaraderie and commiseration that was entirely _not_ how Danny was supposed to be thinking about him right now. Ward took hold of the plaque's edge with his numb fingers, and Meghan took her hand away.

The results were completely inevitable.

The plaque slipped; Danny grabbed for it, Meghan grabbed for it, and Ward just stared as it hit the edge of the table, bounced, flipped, and hit the floor.

Carrying the metaphor for their company, for their lives, to its inevitable disastrous conclusion.

He'd already seen it shatter so clearly in his mind's eye that he couldn't quite wrap his head around what was happening as Meghan knelt and picked it up. She turned it over to check the edges. "No scuffs," she said. "Oh, no! It's chipped here." She ran her thumb over the corner, and looked Ward's direction, a bit desperately. "I think it might have scratched the floor too."

"It's ... uh, don't worry about it," Ward said, on autopilot, still staring. "Isn't that, uh. Glass?"

"It's borosilicate glass," Meghan said, still examining the plaque for cracks. "They use that for this kind of etching. It's more durable than normal glass. I mean, it can still break, but -- Sir, I'm _so_ sorry. It was my fault entirely."

"It's just a piece of glass, Meghan, it's okay," Danny said, smiling at her.

"But it's chipped," Meghan said, looking woeful.

"You can't even really see it," Danny said. "It's okay, right, Ward?"

"Right," Ward echoed. The shivers were back, waves of them, wracking him. He couldn't get a full breath.

Meghan set the plaque on the table this time. Danny placed a hand on top of it, nodded invitingly to Ward, who did likewise. Their fingers brushed, and Danny frowned. "Your hands are ice cold," he whispered.

"Sorry my hands aren't up to your standards," Ward whispered back, more or less on autopilot.

"Smile now!" Meghan said, and Ward pasted on what he suspected was a deeply unconvincing smile. For some reason he found himself thinking of Joy, telling him that he didn't make a good front man for the company, that he just couldn't do _people ..._

And then it was over, the journalists were off to find something else to take pictures of, and Colleen came trotting up to hug Danny while Ward, carefully, lowered the plaque back into its bed of flowers.

"I really am very sorry about this, Mr. Meachum," Meghan said, running her thumb over the broken edge. "I can have another one ordered."

"No need to," Ward said. He clenched his fist on the edge of the table, fighting down another wave of cold chills and prickling nausea. "I want to keep this one."

It was weird, but he felt proprietary about the damn thing. Even though it made more sense to just order another one, a new plaque that didn't have a crack across the edge, that wasn't responsible (well, by way of Harold) for poisoning him. But he didn't really want to. The damn thing was made of _glass,_ and it had fallen onto a tile floor and bounced, with just a chip off the edge. You had to respect that kind of tenacity.

"Hey, Ward?" Danny's hand caught at his arm, and Ward looked up, as a fresh wave of pain tightened a band around his chest. Danny frowned at him. "Meghan, I'm just going to go talk to Ward, okay? Things are good here, right?"

"I don't want to talk," Ward muttered as Danny shoved him behind the flower arrangement, with Colleen's green blur tagging along at the edges of his telescoping vision. He was really having trouble getting enough air.

"I know you don't, I picked up on that earlier," Danny muttered back, and made no effort to stop herding him along. 

They went out the rear door of the ballroom, and Ward snorted to himself when he saw where Danny was taking him. There was a sort of lounge back here, behind the staging area for the catering staff. It was hard to get to; people typically didn't find it by accident. They'd known about it as kids, of course, because they ran wild behind the scenes and found all the places like this.

Ward didn't know who used it nowadays. There was some furniture inside, couches and the like. They were a bit dusty. Danny steered him to a couch, and Ward went down gratefully. He was breathing a little easier now, but his head had started throbbing, pulsing in time with the pain in his hand. The metallic taste was back in his throat.

"So what the heck is wrong with you, anyway?" Danny asked. Ward glanced up to see that Colleen's green blur had shut the door. "I know you're not going to want me to ask about this, and I'm not judging, I swear I'm not, but -- I thought you _stopped_ with the drugs, Ward."

It hurt, somehow, in a distant kind of way, that Danny thought this was ... but why wouldn't he? "I didn't take anything," Ward said. He didn't really have any energy left for sincerity, just a kind of backed-against-the-wall doggedness. "Really. I didn't."

The couch dipped as Danny sat beside him. "I believe you," he said.

Ward glanced at him. Danny looked utterly sincere -- and worried. He brushed his hand across Ward's forehead; Ward jerked away.

"So if you didn't take drugs, and I _do_ believe you, what's happening to you? You're cold, but you're sweating, and you were _really_ out of it when we were taking photos. Meghan kept asking you questions that you didn't answer." She had? He didn't remember that. Behind Danny, Colleen sat down on the arm of the couch. "And you dropped the plaque, and Ward, you're not clumsy like that, not usually. Plus you're being really touchy, I mean more than usual."

"Thanks," Ward said.

"Seriously, Ward. What's wrong?"

 _My dad likes to poison me for fun._

The truth was insane. He couldn't possibly have said it to anyone else. No one else would have believed it. But ... this was Danny. Danny, who had lived a life that was at least as off the rails as Ward's, if in a completely different way.

"My ... dad," he said, and saw Danny's face change, the worried frown tightening into something angrier. "There were all these little head games he used to play. Tests. And this time I, uh ... I flunked the test."

A new wave of shivering hit him; his headache spiked like a migraine. Danny, incorrigibly touchy-feely as always, placed a hand in the middle of his back. It was warm and firm and grounded him somewhat.

"Ward, you're _drenched_ in sweat. What's happening to you? What'd he do?"

Even apart from the completely bonkers aspect of Dad doing this in the first place, it felt so damn disloyal to say it out loud. After all of this, how fucked up was it that he didn't want to admit his dad was that much of a scumbag, and to Danny of all people? Well, the worst that could happen was Danny thought this one was just a little too over-the-top to believe.

( _...thought he was lying, thought he just wanted attention, remembered all the times Ward HAD lied to him..._ )

"He poisoned me," Ward said, turning his hand over. At some point when he wasn't paying attention, his pricked finger had swollen as if from a bee sting.

"He ... _what?"_

Danny's hand dropped away from Ward's back, and he cupped Ward's hand in his own, examining it gently. Colleen swung her legs off the couch and sat forward on her armrest.

"There was a needle in the ... um ... packaging. For the plaque." His head really hurt. "I didn't think to look beforehand."

"He -- that's -- _Ward_ ...." Danny traded a look with Colleen, one of those same-wavelength couple looks. "Are you -- did this just happen _now?"_

"Upstairs," Ward said. He was shivering harder now. "Look, I appreciate all of the ... everything, I really do, but I'm just going to lie down for a while now."

"No you don't!" Danny protested, pushing him back upright. "You just told me you've been poisoned! Do we need to take you to the hospital? Ward?"

"I'm okay," Ward muttered, trying to extricate his hand, which Danny still had hold of. "He wouldn't kill me. Not like this, anyway." This didn't do anything to wipe the look of mingled horror and worry off Danny's face. "It's just unpleasant. Let me sleep it off for half an hour and I'll be good to go back out there again." He didn't mention that if not for Danny he _would_ still be out there -- he'd gotten through similar events while feeling worse than this; thanks, Harold. But sitting down, just being able to _turn off_ for a few minutes, was such a relief that he couldn't quite find the willpower to get back up again.

"Colleen," Danny said, "could you please go out to the buffet and bring back a couple plates of ... I don't know, something high-calorie, whatever you can find. A lot of it."

"What are you going to do?" Colleen asked, in exactly the tone Ward would have been asking it if she hadn't beaten him to it.

"The thing with your shoulder, remember that?"

"Oh no," Colleen said.

"What are you two talking about?" Ward asked tetchily. Feeling this lousy made his grip on his temper even looser than normal.

Danny squeezed Ward's hand, which he _still_ hadn't let go of. "I can use the Iron Fist to purify. It's one of its functions."

"You what now," Ward said, looking down at their joined hands. He could barely feel Danny's hand on his, just a hint of pressure and warmth. That hand was really numb.

"Danny, you've done it _once,_ with Bakuto's help," Colleen said "And you passed out for two days."

"You what?"

"Just ... please?" Danny gave her a hopeful look. Colleen sighed and got up.

"Don't make me regret helping you with this," she said, and left the room.

"You should lie down, Ward. I'm going to try to heal you."

"What is even happening," Ward muttered, but he sank down to the couch anyway; the room seemed to spin less that way.

"How do you feel? Does it hurt? Can you breathe okay? Your breathing is really fast and shallow."

Oh. That might explain some of the dizziness. Ward made an effort to take slower, deeper breaths. He cracked open his eyes and the first thing he saw was Danny staring down at him with that anxious-golden-retriever expression.

"You don't have to do ... whatever you're going to do," he tried. "I'm feeling better. I just needed to sit down for a minute."

"Ward," Danny said. He huffed out a small laugh and pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead, and looked suddenly, intensely frustrated. "Your dad _poisoned_ you. You've been walking around pretending to be fine, and looking like you're going to pass out. At the buffet earlier --"

"Yeah, about that," Ward said. He closed his eyes. "I'm sorry."

"You -- Ward!"

"I was a dick," Ward said.

Danny sighed and must have adjusted his position. The couch dipped and he jostled Ward's shoulder. "So what else is new?" he said, and Ward smiled a little and opened his eyes again. Danny was sitting on the floor beside the couch, half-reclining with his shoulder against Ward's.

"You know, everything was going pretty well, too, right up until I stuck my finger on a poisoned needle like goddamn Cinderella."

Danny grinned. "I think you mean Snow White. No, wait, Sleeping Beauty. Is that right?" He squeezed Ward's arm. "Hey, Sleeping Beauty, wake up. Stay with me."

"'m fine," Ward mumbled.

"No you're not." Danny sounded anxious and frustrated. "You're _not,_ your breathing is even worse and you look really bad. Just hang on. Colleen will be back in a minute. Actually, I could get started now. I probably should, before it gets worse."

Ward turned his head to the side. "What are you --" he began, but the question died in his throat, because Danny had held up his fist in front of his chest, and it was starting to glow.

He had seen Danny do this once before, but that was in the middle of a firefight after being hit over the head with a golf club, so everything else was a bit distracting. And of course Danny talked about it all the time, to anyone who would listen.

But actually seeing it, really seeing it, was ... amazing.

The golden light crept up through Danny's fingers, illuminated the bones and tendons from within. Light like deep gold honey poured across his chest and lit his face. His expression was rapt, as if the glow in his hand enthralled him as much as it did Ward. 

Ward propped himself up on his elbows, too fascinated to mind his head swimming a little. "What does it feel like?" he asked.

"What?" Danny said. His voice was dreamy, as if he was coming back from somewhere deep inside himself. "Oh ... I can't describe it, not really. It's like feeling the missing half of my soul fall into place, like ... like a vast wellspring of light and warmth, flooding into me, filling me. It's wonderful."

Jealousy stirred in Ward, but not the poisonous, all-consuming jealousy of their childhood. This was more like a gentle envy, similar to the way he felt when he saw Danny and Colleen together. Not _I don't want you to have that_ but _I'm glad you have that; I wish I did too._

On the other hand, it wasn't like he was even remotely capable of training for fifteen years and then fighting a dragon, so there was that.

Danny's eyes went blank; his entire focus, his entire will seemed to have narrowed down to his hand. Ward was fascinated with the glow lighting up Danny's fist, the sheer impossible nature of it, but he was equally fascinated with the look on Danny's face. He was used to normal, everyday Danny, scattered and easily distracted, pingponging from one thought to another. He had never seen Danny that focused before.

Slowly, Danny uncurled his fingers, opening up his hand. The light cascaded across his face, illuminating an expression of wonder. He looked up and met Ward's eyes and grinned brightly.

"I never did that on my own before," he murmured, and lowered his hand, carefully settled it over the back of Ward's injured hand, curling the fingers around to lace them through Ward's.

A protest caught in Ward's throat. He wanted to ask if it was going to hurt. But he already had his answer, because it didn't; it was the opposite of pain, a deep feeling of warmth spreading through his muscles and bones. 

Ward looked up from their joined hands to Danny's face, eyes closed now, rapt and focused inward. 

_Why are you doing this for me?_ he wanted to ask. And: _Is this going to hurt you?_ But he didn't want to distract him; he wasn't sure what that would do.

The door opened and closed quietly. "Oh, well, okay then," Colleen's voice said. She crouched down beside Danny and set her burden on the floor, a stack of at least three plates piled with selections from the buffet, including most of an entire cheesecake. She looked at Ward, bit her lip, and then put her hand on Danny's shoulder and squeezed lightly.

"Wha," Danny said, his eyes snapping open. The light around their joined hands died, and Ward felt suddenly cold.

"I wanted to pull you out before you passed out this time," Colleen said. She gave his shoulder a little shake and then ran her hand up his neck before letting it drop away. "Chi drain, remember? Eat something before you fall over."

"Right," Danny murmured. "Whoa." He put his hands to his forehead, and Colleen quickly grabbed his arm to steady him. "Head rush."

Ward rolled over and sat up. "What's wrong? Are you okay?"

"Chi drain, like Colleen said," Danny muttered, rubbing his forehead. "She's right, I need to eat." He looked up, eyes bright through the hair that had come loose from its gelled immobility and was falling into his face again. "How 'bout you? How do you feel?"

"Better," Ward admitted. He still felt kind of fuzzy-headed and weird and chilly, but the awful tightness in his chest and the miserable, nausea-inducing dizziness was gone. He flexed his hand and noticed the swelling was down, the fingers responding normally. "Yeah, uh ... thank you."

"Eat," Colleen ordered, shoving a plate heaped with bacon rolls and shrimp puffs in the general direction of Danny's knee. She popped a shrimp puff into her mouth, and said indistinctly around it, "You too, Ward. Being healed that way drains your chi too. Ask me how I know."

Ward reached down and picked up the first thing his fingers fell on, which happened to be some kind of mini-cheesecake on a toothpick. He was abruptly ravenous, his body reminding him that he'd been too stressed to eat all day. After inhaling a couple of cheesecake bites, he slithered off the couch to sit on the floor with Danny and Colleen, where the food was easier to reach.

No one came in and bothered them. It was like when they were kids, when they used to find their way in here and spend hours undisturbed by the adults, getting dust all over their kid-sized fancy dress clothes.

In fact ... this _was_ very much like the feeling of being in here with Danny and Joy when they were little kids and there was an adult party going on outside, feeling sneaky and a little bit guilty and hidden and safe.

Different people, in Colleen's case. Different circumstances. But kind of the same feeling.

"We should probably get back out there eventually," he said, reaching for a bacon-wrapped thing before Danny got them all. "There's an entire gala in our honor."

"It's the company's honor," Danny said. "And we did the plaque thing already. Ward, you should have seen your face when it fell."

"I thought it was going to break!"

"Those things can't break," Colleen said. Largely sated at this point -- of course, she'd eaten half the buffet earlier -- she was leaning back against the couch with her shoes off and her bare feet tucked under Danny's thigh. " _You_ try breaking a solid block of glass. It's like it's made out of rocks."

"Does this mean you've tried?" Danny asked.

"Breaking things was often featured in Bakuto's training," Colleen said. She picked up a marinated mushroom on a toothpick, more to give herself something to do with her hands, from the look of things, than because she wanted to eat it.

Danny reached down and squeezed her ankle, and Ward realized that he'd almost forgotten that Colleen used to be Hand, that she had a whole entire _life_ of fighting and training and various kinds of deprivation behind her, too.

And he thought about the plaque, the one that wouldn't break. Just chipped, along the edge. Made of glass, clear and fragile-looking, but actually much stronger than it appeared.

Not everything that looked easy to break actually was.

"Hey, Ward, you want this?" Danny asked, holding out a chocolate-dipped strawberry on a toothpick. "I saved the last one for you. You always liked strawberry-flavored things when we were a kid. I don't know if you still do."

Ward took it, realizing only after he'd already done so that he'd taken it with the injured hand, and it felt fine, no lingering stiffness or soreness. He bit into the strawberry. He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten something like this. It tasted like childhood and summer.


End file.
